Cut and Run

No porn future for a Bobbitt protégé

Everyone wants to get into show business, but not everyone's willing to go the John Wayne Bobbitt route. Houstonian Rene Aramando Nunez is not just anybody, however.

Earlier this month Nunez followed the Bobbitt plan closely: Get involved with an (allegedly) kinda temperamental gal. Have love go sour. Get your dick cut off.

Alas, Nunez failed to adhere to the most important guideline: Make sure you know where the severed penis went. Nunez's estranged girlfriend, who allegedly performed the emergency circumcision, told HPD that she threw the willy onto her porch, where a dog ran off with it. (Any guys reading this, you are now free to uncross your legs.)

Chad Crowe

Backe in his pre-Astros days

Still, Bobbitt turned a truncated johnson into a brief porn career with such films as Frankenpenis. Does Nunez have the same shot?

We turned to an expert, the editor of Adult Video News, a man named Tim Connelly who is no relation to the writer of this column, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, he is skeptical of Nunez's chances for a future in porn. Without that missing 80 percent of the penis, it seems the world of wankers is uninterested.

"Maybe he could do what Bobbitt did," Connelly says. "He said he wanted to be an EMT. He ended up working at a whorehouse for a while. He was a bouncer."

The man who could most help Nunez -- Bobbitt himself -- could not be tracked down. Maybe he's out searching for that dog.

'Sup, Dog?

Speaking of dogs, animal rescue people in Houston are trying to get the word out: If you are overwhelmed by a misbehaving dog or a large litter of pups, don't just give the pets away. Sell them. Forget about all this "free to a good home" crap.

Is this some new Age of Greed brought on by the Bush Mandate? No. It's for the good of the dogs.

There apparently are people out there acting like they just love your little pets, oohing and ahhing at them and spewing baby talk -- until they get them in the car. Then they'll drive the dogs to the nearest research lab that will pay good money for subjects, or the nearest dogfighting operation, where people will pay for the animals to serve as hapless sparring partners for pit bulls.

And even if the folks taking little Fido aren't as evil as all that, they still may end up causing harm. People may take a dog on impulse without thinking through the upkeep costs.

The answer is to charge a fee. "What we get free, we don't value," says Rose Cooksey of Twyla's Friends, a nonprofit rescue group in Kingwood.

Charging also tends to discourage the suppliers of research labs and dogfighting operations, cutting down on their profit margins.

So, hey -- you can actually make money while doing a work of charity. If only Mother Teresa had thought of that.

Ward, It's About Beaver

It had the potential to be on the great legal footnotes of all time.

Attorneys Brian Wice and Stanley Schneider are appealing the conviction of Susan Wright, the Houston woman who stabbed her husband 200 times and buried him in her backyard, by which time he was her ex-husband. Wright's trial featured prosecutor Kelly Siegler dragging into the courtroom the bed where the stabbing took place, hog-tying a colleague to it and reenacting the supposed events in front of the jury.

The bizarre performance fell under the somewhat obscure legal umbrella of "Only in Texas, Man," and it's a key part of Wright's appeal.

That appeal originally included the following footnote (legal citations omitted): "Not surprisingly, the State sought to paint Ms. Wright's marriage as 'perfect,' a latter-day version of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. But Ozzie Nelson and Ward Cleaver never snorted cocaine [or] smoked crack, smoked marijuana, cultivated marijuana, attempted to buy Ecstasy from teenagers, frequented topless bars, assaulted a topless dancer, had a menage a trois with two topless dancers beat his dog had a master-slave relationship with Ms. Wright and urinated on Ms. Wright and their small daughter."

Well, we're pretty sure Ward never pissed on Ms. Wright, at any rate.

While the lawyers kept the list of husbandly misdeeds in, they didn't set it up by saying Ozzie and Ward would never, ever do such things. Extensive legal research revealed, unfortunately, that the two TV dads actually were quite the swingers.

Not really. "I was just concerned," Wice says, "that I had a generation of jurists who remember Ozzie and Ward, and I didn't want them having the image of Ozzie and Ward committing these unconscionable, despicable acts."

Come on, that's a great mental image -- Ward in bondage gear with two strippers, peeing on June?

Lawyers. No fun at all.

Elephant in the Room

Anyone out on the dating scene spends some time thinking about herpes. If you have it, you face the dilemma of just when in a budding relationship you should bring it up. (Not to mention how.) If you don't have it, you're checking every cold sore on your partner and wondering.